Excerpt from The Accidentals by Guadalupe Nettel, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

'You can come in, if you like,' said a voice so sweet I felt compelled to obey it. It was then that I saw there was someone sitting in the back of the room, in front of what must have been a wardrobe or, at most, the door to a bathroom. This person was dressed the same as the others: black trousers, a red top and cap. It was impossible to make out their gender. On their lap, a box of sweets just like the ones brought around by the confectionery vendors in cinemas and theatres shortly before the show begins. What was this person doing there in work mode, as if there were customers to sell to? Their only potential buyer, at least at that moment, was me. For a second I thought about asking once and for all what kind of place this was, but I didn't, probably because it seemed obvious that the sweets were a front and that asking would not only be awkward but would put everyone involved on the defensive.

'I'm sorry, but my wife is waiting to make a birthday cake and I've already wasted a lot of time. She'll be annoyed by now, and if I don't go back home soon, she'll put me in the oven instead of the cake.'

My interlocutor lifted her gaze. She was a girl with her hair cut very short, and she had large brown eyes, which she fixed on me imploringly.

'Take one of our sweets, at least—it'll sweeten your way back home,' she said, as softly as before, holding out a cellophane bag with a tiny little sweet inside it. 'It's a sample, I won't charge you for it.'

I didn't want to be rude, so I accepted her gift and popped it into my mouth. Immediately an aniseed flavour washed over my tongue. I like most sweets, but there are some flavours that drive me wild, and one of these is aniseed. As I savoured it, I walked rapidly, resigned to my wife being ticked off.

I entered the house breathing hard to let her know that I had run all the way home, but instead of finding Lili at the stove, her apron covered in flour as I had left her almost forty minutes earlier, I saw her sitting on the sofa, absorbed in one of those comedies I find entertaining and which she never lets us watch. At first I told myself that she had decided to do without the vanilla extract, but there was no smell of cake either, and in the kitchen not a trace that she had been baking.

'Sorry, darling,' I said with an artificially remorseful tone. 'The shop was really busy. What time is Clara getting here? Will you have enough time to finish off her birthday cake?'

Only then did my wife lift her gaze from the TV, a strange expression on her face.

'I think you've got mixed up,' she said, 'her birthday's a month away.'

I am an absent-minded man, and so would gladly have believed that this was a misunderstanding if we hadn't spent part of that afternoon planning the menu and going over the ingredients for her birthday dinner.

'Is today not the twenty-fourth of September anymore?' I said flippantly.

'It is, but Clara's birthday is the twenty-fifth of October. Don't you remember the date your own daughter was born?'

Of course I remembered. I had written it dozens of times on all kinds of official documents over the course of my life, and I was certain it wasn't in October.

I let Lili carry on watching her film and went up to the study to call Clara. In the background, I could hear the din of an airport at full volume, with that metallic voice calling passengers to start boarding, and it was clear she didn't have the slightest intention of coming over this evening.

'Can I call you in a couple of hours, Dad?'

She must have noticed bewilderment in the few words I managed to stammer out, because immediately she asked:

'Is something wrong? Is Mum alright?

'Everything's fine. I just wanted to say hi.'

The confusion remained with me for the rest of the night. As I tossed and turned, I wondered if I wasn't starting to suffer from some kind of dementia, as Lili insinuated on a regular basis, and whether I ought to go and see a neurologist.

Excerpted from The Accidentals by Guadalupe Nettel. Copyright © 2025 by Guadalupe Nettel. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.